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Montag, 29. April 2019

Quote from Kim Stanley Robinson’s ANTARCTICA [Sci-Fi novel, USA, 1997, p. 599] “The problem is not caused by the values of radical ecology, but by the exploitative economy of a global system in which the tiny aristocracy of the rich overexploit the world's natural and human resources, retreating to their fortress-like mansions or islands with their booty, leaving the rest of us to survive as best we can in the ruins they have escaped from. This is twilight capitalism, this is the world in which we live and, as you say, colonialism has never ceased, this feudalism has never ceased and this has nothing, nothing at all, to do with the so-called democratic values with which the masses are lulled into. In fact, the entire military of the world is currently engaged in helping this system to victory over any group that takes the idea of democracy seriously....”

In using the term twilight capitalism, Robinson alludes to the twilight of the gods, that quasi-religious parody of the ancient Norse myth, glorified by the Schickelgruber Fascists of the third Reich: With Ragnarök, destroyer of worlds in Asgard, as the force that ultimately brings down the principle of competition at a global scale.

These days, in common parlance, and criminal parlance at that, this is known as free markets, while the full time con men are self-deluding themselves into believing that this primitive and systemic approaches are a social market economy – even though they well know that markets and freedom, not to mention social considerations, are mutually exclusive concepts.

What could have passed for Sci-Fi slush in the early nineties of the twentieth century, is now – with the collapse of neo-liberalism and the dawn of the neo-feudal machinations of large corporations at the beginning of the twenty-first century – becoming a life-destroying actuality.

Purely economic, and thus hyper-destructive, globalisation will inevitably result in social imbalances that will make all human catastrophes we have witnessed so far seem like a sunny Sunday stroll in the park.

Perhaps the most acute examples are on the one hand the military industrial complex with its endless war mongering against so-called terrorism, which is in fact just instrumentalised as a marketing tool, and on the other hand the current wholesale movement of people that manifests itself as either mass tourism or refugee crises.

Mass tourism as a massive polluter and cultural simulation that it contributing to global warming and refugees as a result of the “war for the sake of consumption war" in the name of the growth religion, which is really an earth-encompassing fact of diminishing life.

This destroys old, outdated and undoubtedly false worldviews as well as natural resources and achievements of civilisation. A cave man and Stone Age civilisation that has lasted over six thousand years caught up in the intoxication of consumer fascism fuelled by fossil energy sources.

A further symptom of consumer fascism and the twilight delusion is the rapid demise of democratic ideas following the presumed end of the Cold War. In the allegedly democratic regions of the world, the mentally disturbed and criminal-minded assert themselves as representatives of the people.

The electorate actually chooses its own – proverbial – butchers, against its very own interests. Kurt Tucholsky is once again spinning in his grave. The Mad President or the vintage fascists in Poland/Hungary/Austria today demonstrate how the nation state is descending into a corporately-driven global consumer totalitarianism.

The political representatives are only Valium for the people. But neither are the decisions being made in global conspiracies – just dictated by a mechanics or religious worship of the supposed market forces. Humans are only partly what is lubricating the big machine; the auto-response software in the stock market are now more important.

When expressed pessimistically or more aptly ‘after post-modernity’, we have already extinguished ourselves as how intelligent a species we might ever have ever been. Optimistically, i.e. beyond post-post-modernity, we are all on the verge of a new beginning.

The big question is whether we will actually be heading towards new developments, thereby outgrowing consumer fascism or not?
We will get answers to these questions in the coming decades. Student crusades against their parents' ideologies of wastefulness and extinction as well as non-viable and borderline demented politicians in nation-state constructs that have become irrelevant, give reasons to hope for a future that is wiser, more progressive and more worth living in.

Perhaps it is time to take the sentence “Wage labour is desecration and consumption for the sake of growth causes destruction” and paste it into the murderously Christian album of Liberals and Conservatives alike.

translated by: Malte Forstat

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If fear and malice are seen as reasonable, resistance becomes a civic duty.

Donnerstag, 4. April 2019

[caption:] No religion should be part of this world… Dangerous criminals and rapists only deserve limited rights.
These days, in this our twenty-first century, the ‘human right’ to freedom of religion has been turned into the opposite of human rights as a whole. Current religiously motivated practices have superseded the right to dignified human existence and are thereby a contradiction of the seemingly humanitarian concept behind the human rights in general.

When the highest representative of the faith most notorious for child abuse – the Pope in Rome – gathers together the abusive multitudes, we need to be on red alert.
It is said that the purpose of this event is to ‘re-evaluate’ the Criminal History of Christianity. For the millionth time, the largest criminal organisation in human history is trying to pull its neck out of the noose of the enlightenment.

And to a certain extent, they will once again manage to do so. Superstition is deeply rooted in the human condition; the brain will happily make the body believe anything in order to keep it alive. Religion is an archaic form of social policy that preys on people’s emotions and their longing for spirituality and ‘a being higher or other than oneself’.
In light of the history of civilisation, the sense of religion has long been in doubt, even as that ‘sense of purpose’ was pushed ahead using mass murder, bloodshed and tears. It was only the Enlightenment that brought about further cultural achievements. However, all over the world, those are currently being pushed back by right-wing dunderheads, retro-Nazis, the finance capital and, needless to say, faith-based groups.

One topical example, a mere 14 centuries ago, is Islam. …/An honest-to-God camel herdsman marries his – slightly wilted – superior to get his hands on money and power. Following her demise, he immediately founds a heavily armed roving warrior ‘nation’ and, taking a leaf from the Greeks, the Jews and the Romans (Christians), he quickly conquers himself an ‘empire’. This violent superstition, with its Judeo-Christian trappings, persists into the present day, with an immediate impact on the people subjected to its rule. It serves as a rallying cry for all kinds of holy warriors and, most of all, as a tool for suppressing the female half of Muslim societies and for cementing the power hegemony of the clerics.

With their most recent conference, Christendom seeks to save the Catholic church – and they will successfully do so. That is a catastrophe. All Christian churches will come to their own inhumane conclusions. As a result, all of these Jesus sects – from Catholics and Orthodox at the end, via hysterical Protestants to the Coptic origins – will remain a cesspool to catch the sewage of organised crime, war mongering, money laundering and (not only sexualised) violence against people.

Instead of being disowned and shunned, the freedom of religious worship will continue to undermine human rights in general.

So progressive, democratically minded and cosmo-political people will only have to console themselves with the following motto: God and intelligence are not part of the universe – it works without them.

... and: Morality has nothing to do with religion. In fact, the opposite is the case, as demonstrated by the history of religions – on any continent and in any era.

Anyone still keen on having a part of this monotheism scam, could do worse than getting a load of the unutterably bad novel series Warhammer 40,000: The whole genocidal story, just wrapped up as SciFi. Definitely more realistic and Roman than the longwinded pamphlet that is the Bible.

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If fear and malice are seen as reasonable, resistance becomes a civic duty.

On the occasion of the demise of the Mars Opportunity Rover that was supposed to work for 90 days but was still busily active on the Marsan surface for just under 15 years, allow me to put my two cents in concerning this issue. This nimble little robot explored the surface of Mars and has generated untold amounts of data. A dust storm in the summer of 2018 at last sealed its fate.

Mars: The red planet, god of war and desirable destination of a hubris-ridden species living one planet inward from it in an insignificant star system at the outer fringes of this massive intergalactic party.

It is this irradiated and poisoned desert planet that, if the hubristic monkeys get their say, will soon be the home for people. Bullshit, it won’t! The exploration of Mars is in full swing – and it happens in the only way possible: fully automatically or semi-autonomously using machines.

The little robot assistants to the big and admittedly only partially intelligent monkeys are whizzing around on the surface or are mapping the planet from orbit. They have already discovered water, iron and a variety of other resources.

There is nothing to be said against automated utilisation of these resources to further the goals of the tool using apes. Even isolated mining stations or fuel refineries operated by humans are in the realm of what’s possible.

But actual settlements are not happening – after all, who wants to live in constant twilight, immersed in radiation, stuck in a lava tube? Toxic dust makes every stroll a living nightmare and a form of self-torture, requiring massively uncomfortable hazmat suits.

Not to mention: Would you like to be locked up for months and years in a confined space with a bunch of other weirdos? Also, nobody really knows how fungi and other cultures develop in small habitats.

Certainly, Space X are on the right path when they use space tourism as a way of dumping the odd billionaire on Mars so that he doesn’t bother us here on Earth, but that is not what one might call a settlement. Instead, we could see it as a creative form of suicide. Mars One has failed. But that start-up&go-down media hoax was more or less stillborn.

What Mars is ideal for is as a fuel dump for exploring the solar system – the asteroid belt in particular – and as a place for scientific research. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that this is the way we’re headed. The sky is NOT the limit. Let us build a ring of machines around the Earth… the rest we will sort out later…

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If fear and malice are seen as reasonable, resistance becomes a civic duty.